Grandma's refrigerator and Schrodinger's cat

Here's a story for you about the kinds of things you have to deal with when helping clean out your grandmother's refrigerator. This may or may not hit home for some of you out there.

One weekend, my wife and I volunteered our weekend to go and watch over my grandmother so that my parents could get away on a guilt-free no-strings-attached vacation. As she is 92 years old (I think.. I can never remember) and has a hard time getting around her in-law apartment, my parents are concerned for her well-being whenever they leave her alone. So, as a service, we offer to come down and spend time with her, eat some meals with her, and help her out with any tasks that need to be completed.

One such task was the cleaning out of her refrigerator and freezer. That one fell to me. Although I suppose I shouldn't complain... my wife cleaned the bathroom, which was probably just as disgusting, but not nearly as funny as my task.

Now if you've ever poked around the refrigerator of somebody who was born around that time period, it's an eye-opening experience. They never throw anything out. I know that the depression-era mentality dictates you don't waste any food, but some of that post-dated stuff can kill you if you try it. Or at least grow legs and escape out of the fridge when you open the door.

To give you an idea of what I was dealing with, I found about 12 containers of sour cream. That's right 12. Many different brands and many different versions (plain, lite, etc), all with one thing in common: they were all well overdue... by at least 6 months.

Now, when I see something like that in my fridge, it goes right in the trash. What my grandmother does is open it up, taste it, and decide if it's still good or not. Ugh. So yeah, she was sampling year old sour cream, amongst other things. Much to my chagrin.

The winner of the "oldest item in the refrigerator" sweepstakes was a crock of butter from the month when I started college... 10 bleepin' years ago! So of course she takes it from me, opens it up to reveal the giant fissure which has worked it's way across and down through the hardened butter, swipes her finger across the top, tastes it, and says "That's still good!" Unbelievable.

My favorite policy was by far the theory of "if it's never been opened, it's still good". Like many of the sour cream containers which I begrudgingly put back in the fridge after she opened up the lid and saw that the foil cover was still securely in place. I later referred to this theory as the culinary equivalent of "Schrodinger's cat". You see, the theory was that if you locked a cat in a solid lead box with an ampule of cyanide, there was no way to determine if the cat was alive or dead inside without opening it. It was a paradox that stated that at that moment, before the box is opened and the answer is revealed, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time. Apparently, the same goes for sour cream. Because we refused to peel back the foil cover, the sour cream is allowed to be both good and moldy and disgusting at the same time.

So I determined that if I was going to really help my grandmother, I would have to do it on the QT. So when she was busy examining the contents of one container, I would stealthily be tossing stuff out with the other hand. I got caught a couple of times, at which point I had to convince her that I was 're-throwing out' stuff that I already had tossed in, thus staying one step ahead of my elderly grandmother... I'm so going to hell.

Well, by the time we got to working on the freezer, Cindy finished up in the bathroom. Now I had some help. Because what we saw in the freezer were boxes for frozen dinners that had the look and feel of boxes that were manufactured in the 1970s...early 1980s at the most conservative estimate. Cindy even exclaimed at one point, "I remember seeing that packaging around in the 70s!" Undaunted, grandma wanted to keep them. So we went to plan B:

"Look over there!"

Cindy would distract grandma by getting her to look off in some other direction while I would grab a handful of frozen items and toss them right in the garbage bag. There was no getting caught this time. Not with my fantastic accomplice by my side. Everything must go! Including stuff in that freezer that we could neither identify as being meat or bread. And 8 years worth of Thanksgiving turkey gizzards. Ahh, good times.

So anyways, thanks to our effort, my grandmother now has one fantastically clean fridge and freezer. And some sour cream that may not kill her.